How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution - scientific, political, and spiritual - and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth - its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutistpolitical theology - made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus - whether in Mary Shelley's esotericnovel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus - is a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation andunprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectualtraditions of critique. | Black Prometheus by Jared Hickman, Paperback | Indigo Chapters